


no grave can hold my body down

by aloethevera



Category: Original Work, 文豪ストレイドッグス | Bungou Stray Dogs
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:14:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aloethevera/pseuds/aloethevera
Summary: someone wakes up.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	no grave can hold my body down

Her body goes limp. Her lungs heave one last breath. And her eyes never shut, but they're empty. 

Someone else's eyes open elsewhere. 

The void. The endless nothing. The lonely quiet. A place where nothing ever was, and nothing will ever be, and where she doesn't exist and yet she *must*, because she's thinking this here. Where? She doesn't know. Who is "she"? She doesn't know. When is this? Never, but also now, and nothing is nowhere, but everything's everywhere. 

It's an endless ocean, an endless expansion of suffocating liquid. And if she wants to leave she needs to pick a direction and move, somehow. She can't tell which way is up or down, and she can't tell left from right, even if she knew what those words meant on their own. 

She doesn't have any limbs to move with, she doesn't have a mouth or ears to call out for help or hear a response. She shouldn't *be*, but who else *is* there? It's lonely here and she wouldn't like it in the slightest, if she knew what it meant, to like something.

It'd be so much easier to just stay here, let the loneliness and the dread and the fear crush her.

No, that's no good, is it? 

She kicks. She moves. This is new, and foreign, and it makes her want to cry a little bit, but she keeps struggling, twisting and struggling with phantom limbs that aren't hers. And slowly, she gets somewhere. The determination to get. out. keeps her going, filling secondhand veins with adrenaline and energy there shouldn't be, energy that isn't hers. 

The morgue closes for the night, just a few people left in it, on the far side. 

The body they'd brought in, of an affluent heiress, with wood under its fingernails and the remains of a quiet d/eath in its lungs blinks. 

Once, twice, three times. 

The light is blinding, and her breathing is shallow, but steady, trying to get as much air as she can in as quickly as possible. 

It's quiet, and for a second, she can't really tell if she's out of the void, but she must be. 

She doesn't try moving, not yet. There isn't anyone here, in this space, as far as she could tell, but she's not sure she's actually capable of it. 

So she pulls a face! She looks from side to side, smiles, scowls, and sticks her tongue out, making sure everything's in working order. She can't really see the rest of her self, but she thinks there *must be* a "rest of herself" if there's a head with parts that can move. 

Being just this wouldn't be ideal! 

One of her fingers twitches, then bends fully, followed by the rest of her hand closing. Huh! That's interesting! She raises that limb to get a look at it, and it does seem familiar, but not quite! 

It's strange-looking, but that's fine, it's hers and that's important! She checks her other side, and sure enough, she's got two, that's so cool! These new things are used to help her sit up, and get a look at her legs, which aren't as weird, and look a little better than her arms. 

Her thoughts aren't really in English, but they're also not *not* in English, she's not even sure if she has proper thoughts, or if language is useful at all. 

There's a bracelet with a tag around her ankle, and the bends it to get a better look at it.  
It's pretty cool with its texture, and there's squiggles on it, if only she could make out what they meant! 

She catches a glimpse of her reflection in a polished metal surface, and at first, she doesn't really realize that it's hers. An angular face with short, dark hair, oddly-sized limbs and a weird gown-thing. She doesn't like it very much, but it follows her movements so it's *probably* her, it's fine for now but hopefully she can do something about that later. 

There's a bad vibe to the place she's in, and she's got a feeling that most people here don't tend to wake up like this. 

There's a window left carelessly open too. Now that's pretty cool! Her clumsy fingers undo the bracelet around her ankle, and she drops it, getting onto shaky legs. Walking is tricky, but she gets the hang of it pretty quickly, like she'd definitely done it before. The legs she was using already learnt to do this, she just hadn't. 

Slowly, carefully, she makes her way out, dropping onto a garbage bin underneath the window. Ouch! That's not very nice!

In the morning, the staff will be bewildered to find no body and a discarded bracelet under the table. A bracelet that identified the missing body as a Miss  
"Mary Shelley".

**Author's Note:**

> title from hozier's "work song"!


End file.
